Page:Saga of Billy the Kid.djvu/33

personalities. No matter what they did in the world or what the world thought of them, they were my friends. Both were real men. Both were worth knowing."

John Chisum died at Eureka Springs, Missouri, in 1884, and lies buried at Paris, Texas, his boyhood home, and the town he founded is his monument. History has dealt with him meagrely. You find his name mentioned here and there in printed chronicles with a surprising paucity of biographical detail. He remains a dim figure illuminated only by an episode now and then, like a mountain leak struck by an occasional shaft of sunlight shining through mists. There is still extant a daguerreotype portrait of the old cattle king who rode to fortune and power in his shirt sleeves on a cow pony. It shows a good, homely, honest face with alert, shrewd eyes and a suggestion of force and drive in the square chin and the set of the generous mouth. It is hardly an impressive picture. But it would be an unjust estimate that did not rank John Chisum as one of the great trail blazers and pioneers of the Southwest. He was a constructive force from first to last—a builder. Not an architect of civilization, perhaps, but a labourer laying in the sweat of his brow the foundation stones on which arose civilization and law and order.

The years have transformed the lower Pecos Valley. Northward within sight of South Spring Ranch, Roswell stands to-day, metropolis of eastern New Mexico, with ten thousand people, asphalted streets, imposing business blocks, beautiful homes embowered in trees. The once-arid plains now blossom like the rose. Artesian water from an exhaustless subterranean reservoir gushes from a thousand wells to irrigate farms and gardens. Along the trail which Chisum's herds followed to market now runs a railroad.